22. A Lectionary of Christian Prose from the Second Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. A. C. Bouquet
Dr Bouquet expresses a hope – already justified as regards one reader – that his book may ‘prove a useful anthology for private reading’, but he makes it quite clear that this is not his main concern. His real aim is to find non-scriptural ‘lessons’ suitable for reading aloud at ‘school and college prayers . . . special Lenten services . . . guild instructions’, and, indeed, at all services where scriptural lessons are not laid down by the use of our Church. He naturally disclaims any intention ‘to challenge or supersede the canon of the Christian Scriptures’. He distinguishes rather sharply between the doctrinal and the edificatory functions of the Canon. Lessons are read to a congregation in order to edify it; not everything in the Bible edifies, and much that is not in the Bible does; hence, Dr Bouquet argues, the Church in the past has omitted parts of scripture from the Lectionary and included non-scriptural lessons from saints’ lives, the Fathers, and the like.
His own book offers a preliminary selection of extracts for such a use, which he desires to see revived. I say a ‘preliminary’ selection, partly because the editor himself modestly claims only to have ‘made a beginning’, and partly because the actual survival of any extract under liturgical conditions may depend – as, in some sort, the formation of the Canon itself doubtless depended – on a kind of ‘natural selection’. I very much doubt whether the rhapsodical passage from Professor Holland given on p. 43 could be endured twice by most English congregations. I also doubt whether the piece of Berkeley (p. 4) will be of much use to those who know nothing of Berkeley's system: but Dr Bouquet may reply that the Church still sees fit to tear from their context and read as epistles scraps of Pauline argument at least equally difficult. What I feel more certain of is that those who do not know the medieval meaning of ‘sensuality’ will not be edified by Chaucer's statement (p. 134) that it ought to ‘have lordship over the body of man’.
These, however, are points of minor importance, for the collection as a whole is rich and varied, and it was not to be hoped that 100 per cent of successes could be attained. A more serious criticism might take the form of a question: Why, in a Christian lectionary, do we find Carlyle, Emerson, R. L. Stevenson, and G. B. Shaw? Dr Bouquet's answer, I suppose, would turn once more on his distinction between doctrine and edification and on the obvious truth that many unbelievers have written what can edify Christians. As Justin Martyr says on p. 61: ‘Whatever all men have uttered aright belongs to us’. But if this principle is accepted, it at once raises the question whether such great pagan doctors as Plato (whom Dr Bouquet's chronological limit excludes) would not have been much more edifying than any of the unbelievers whom he has admitted. To say this is, of course, to demand that Dr Bouquet should have made a different plan, and this may be bad criticism: but I am a little uneasy lest the absence of Plato and the presence of Carlyle may encourage some readers in the false notion that the difference between Pagan and Christian is somehow less important in modern than in ancient times – that no one who wore a collar and tie and trousers could really be a pagan teacher in the same way as a man in sandals and a robe. In this connection it is, perhaps, unfortunate that the nineteenth century should be represented by more than forty authors, while the seventeenth, which comes nearest, shows only fifteen; but anyone who has tried to collect good extracts on any subject will know that this is not Dr Bouquet's fault – do what you will, that maligned and golden period is bound to top the list. Of the pagan witnesses in this book, Stevenson seems to me to bear the test of Christian surroundings better than any other.
The fate of this book as a lectionary will be decided by experience: in the meantime the reader in solitude cannot help judging it as an anthology, and as such I have found it a valuable work. No man ever agrees with another man's choice, and to disagree is one of the pleasures of using an anthology. I myself should have liked more Chesterton and von Hügel and less Robertson and Jowett, and am longing to ask Dr Bouquet, ‘Where is Boethius? Where (since you admit dissenters) is George Macdonald?’ But this is only to say that Dr Bouquet and I are two men and not one man. I have found in his collection much edifying and pleasing work that I did not know before, and much of what I already know and hoped to find there. The book will be useful to hundreds of readers.
If a second edition is called for I hope the editor will tell us where, in the works of its authors, each passage is to be found; otherwise one of the chief uses of an anthology – that of directing us to the originals – is frustrated. I hope, too, that he will be persuaded to follow a different reading (that of the C text) in the third line of his extract from Piers Plowman, and, indeed, to give us the whole passage in plain prose rather than in a half-hearted attempt at the metre of the original. There are also some misprints to be corrected.